This is the first book published by the Association of Russians in Croatia.
Skiljan said that only 1,279 Russians currently lived in Croatia but that regardless of its small size, the ethnic minority was very well organised.
He said that the first significant arrivals of Russians in Croatia were recorded in the 1921 census, following the October Revolution in Russia. After World War II, the number of Russian immigrants started to decline and they started to move back to the former Soviet Union after
the Cominform Resolution of 1948. According to the censuses of 1953, 1961, 1971, 1981 and 1991 the number of Russians continued to decline steadily and in 1991 there were 706 Russians in Croatia, said Skiljan.
The number of Russian immigrants started to rise again after Croatia declared independence from the former Yugoslav federation. Various Croatian companies that operated on the Russian market in the late 1990s and early 2000s used to send their engineers and workers to Russia for a period of several months, during which some of them married local women.
The number of Russians in the 2001-2011 period grew from 906 to 1,279, Skiljan said, adding that the number was now likely to stagnate since Croatian companies were no longer landing jobs in Russia.
The legacy of the Russian community in Croatia is visible, among other things, in the fact that there is a Russian Orthodox church in the northern Adriatic town of Crikvenica. According to the 1921 census, there were 306 Russians in that town.
The president of the Association of Russians in Croatia, Viktorija Celan, said that the association officially started working in 2009 and that it had more than 135 members from all over Croatia.